[imagesource: Dado Ruvic / Reuters]

The world was overjoyed this week when pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced that their recent COVID-19 vaccine trial was looking particularly promising.

They and their partner, BioNTech, claimed that the vaccine was 90% effective.

They’re calling it BNT162B2, which is considerably better than what Eli Lilly & Co. named their breakthrough COVID-19 treatment.

The announcement has already impacted responses to the pandemic, with some convinced that our country was saved from returning to harsher lockdown restrictions after news of the vaccine’s possible efficacy reached the government.

That’s the good news.

The bad news, via Health24, is that it’s highly unlikely that the vaccine will become widely available in South Africa.

To remain viable, the vaccine has to be stored at precise and freezing temperatures (minus 70 degrees Celsius), which we don’t have the capacity to do on a large scale.

In the United States, large city hospitals are already “rushing to buy the expensive ultra-cold freezers” that cost between R150 000 and R235 000 each, to store the shots, for which Pfizer and BioNTech will apply for an emergency license from the US regulator, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), later this month, Statnews reports.

South Africa doesn’t have the requisite ultra-cold freezers to house the vaccine, with the exception of a few at research institutions such as the National Institute for Communicable Diseases.

To add to the problem, mRNA vaccine technology, used to create the vaccine, is new – not a single vaccine using mRNA messengers has been licensed for human use up to date.

“I don’t know if we could really even contemplate an mRNA vaccine with our present setup,”  explains Barry Schoub, chair of South Africa’s ministerial advisory committee on coronavirus vaccines.

“Things may change, but with our present setup, the places where we could actually utilise it would be so limited that it would be a major challenge.”

We’re also unlikely to be able to afford to buy enough freezers to store the number of doses needed to immunise the entire country.

Schoub, who is also a virologist and former director of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, says:

“You can’t really store vaccines reliably and sustainably at minus 20 degrees Celsius anywhere outside the bigger cities. Especially if you’re looking at places with a hotter climate, like the Northern Cape or KwaZulu-Natal, even maintaining a freezer at minus 20 is going to be a question mark.”

In the Western Cape, a 2015 study published in Vaccine found that government-managed vaccine supply chains were often unable to manage the temperatures at which vaccines need to be stored, adequately. That study focused dominantly on existing vaccines, many of which only need to be stored at between two and eight degrees Celsius.

It should also be noted that South Africa is only expecting to get enough COVID-19 vaccines for around 5% of the population next year. The major rollout will likely only happen over the next two years.

So, while it’s great that a viable vaccine is in the works, we need to prepare ourselves for some technical difficulties along the way.

Read the full article, with a more detailed breakdown, here.

[source:health24]